The Lesson of Matthew Shepard

Published: October 17, 1998

It was a painful and soul-searching moment for the nation when Matthew Shepard was buried in Casper, Wyo., yesterday. The details of his murder have been a public horror -- he was singled out, apparently, because he was gay, tied to a fence, beaten and left in a coma in the chill of night. His death at the tender age of 21 has brought home to the American public as nothing else ever has the menace and hatred that homosexuals still face in being honest in the United States.

There have been many other murders through the years. People were repelled in 1992 when a Navy enlisted man, Allen Schindler, was stomped to death in a men's room by two crewmates. Other young men have died horribly all around the country -- slashed and dumped into the water off Staten Island, dropped through a manhole to drown in a Boston sewer, chased and stabbed to death in San Francisco, strangled and burned in Florida. The Southern Poverty Law Center, after studying F.B.I. statistics, has calculated that gay men and lesbians are six times as likely to be physically attacked as Jews or Hispanics in America, and twice as likely as African-Americans.

But the pattern has never fixed itself in the public mind the way racial assaults have. This is a culture that responds to images, and there is something about the picture of Matthew Shepard -- a college student, fresh of face and full of promise -- and the stark cruelty of his death that has held the nation's horrified attention this last week.

For homosexuals, the key to winning acceptance and respect has been to make themselves familiar, visible and known. Yet in almost 30 years of struggle to repeal state sodomy laws and win equal protection under law, the modern gay rights movement has never achieved a recognizable public face. Now, in a victim, a young man who wanted to be a diplomat, it has been given one. His murder has brought out enough sneers, jokes, caricatures and graffiti on college campuses across the land to make it clear that bias against homosexuals is not just an attitude among young toughs like the two high school dropouts who have been charged with the killing. In a society in which fundamentalist religious leaders and prominent Republican politicians insist on castigating homosexuals as a threat, that bias is everywhere.

The need for hate-crime laws is obvious. But a student at the University of Wyoming yesterday held up a sign declaring a more basic need: ''Attack Intolerance With Education.'' We can take inspiration from the example of Judy and Dennis Shepard. On the day they were to bury their murdered son, they stood in the rain outside the City Hall in Casper to thank the American people for messages of sympathy and support. ''We are honored and touched beyond measure,'' Mr. Shepard said, as his wife wept. Then, protected from radical fundamentalist protesters by a police barricade, they buried Matthew Shepard from the church in which he had been an acolyte.

It is a murder that seems to have aroused the deepest decent sympathies of the nation, a case in which law, religion, love, dignity and politics all seem on the side of a dead young gay man. It is a rare moment, and politicians and preachers had better take a lesson.